


A Legilimens' spelling

by PhoenixMarsLander



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Drarry, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-07-03 07:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15814581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixMarsLander/pseuds/PhoenixMarsLander
Summary: There should have been anagainst, between them.But it was all cancelled, for a strange twist of fate, aclickon the wrong key, and it turned out there was aDracoHarryat the end of the page. Just like that – all one word.





	A Legilimens' spelling

  
Draco and Harry.  
There's something extremely wrong with these three words.  
First of all – the names. They're _Malfoy_ and _Potter_ to each other, always. Or _Ferret_ and _Scarhead_ , at least.  
Secondly, there's a coordinating conjunction. An unforgivable mistake, as there are only verbs of hatred and resentment between Potter and Malfoy, white knuckles and bloody ties.  
This story starts with a typing error, a simple omission.  
Harry was leaving the Astronomy tower, his head threatening to explode in a million little pieces of heavy thoughts.  
They should have met for a second, a meaningless moment – useless for the main plot – and shouted two or three insults at each other. There should have been an _against_ , between them. But there wasn't.  
It was all cancelled, for a strange twist of fate, a _click_ on the wrong key, and it turned out there was a _DracoHarry_ at the end of the page. Just like that – all one word.  
Them, who couldn't even stand being in the same paragraph, squashed together in a single word.  
_DracoHarry_. One right next to the other.  
And that's how it happened – the Gryffindor's shoulder touched the Slytherin's one.  
«Sorry» Harry whispered instinctively, before realizing who he had hit.  
And Draco, Draco that night was feeling so frustrated that he would have killed anyone - let alone Potter. He got even angrier when he heard that whisper, which was too faint, too weak, so _not like Potter_.  
Without a second thought, he grabbed the other boy by the uniform and threw him against the nearest wall, enjoying for a moment the bright glimmer in his eyes. And that glimmer was all _due to him_.  
He knew that the Gryffindor's shove would have come, but he didn't move to avoid it. He took Potter's wave of rage and gulped it all up and then walked away with gritted teeth and a weight in his stomach.  
It should have ended there – full stop and on to the next chapter.  
But someone allowed himself to smile, in front of that oversight, and turned the page to keep on writing, the _DracoHarry_ still stuck in the previous sheet, highlighted automatically in red as a trivial mistake.

~

The narrator is the ultimate Legilimens, we all know that.  
He searches through the characters' mind, he knows their intentions, he holds their emotions. Not even the walls of Hogwarts are informed as much as him, who wanders among forbidden forests and Whomping willows without ever getting hurt.  
For him, the people who breathe ink have no secrets.  
But Draco Malfoy, well, he's one of the finest Occlumens in History. We all know that.

~

Later, he would have said he was there by chance, that he was just passing by.  
As if he didn't know Potter's schedule by heart.  
For weeks, everyone had been treating him as if he had been made of porcelain, always about to break, when actually he'd already been in pieces for quite some time. And while his father was rotting in Azkaban, Draco was doing the same in his personal prison, serving a life sentence in his own flesh.  
For weeks, everyone had been looking at him with compassion and a sort of automatic fear. Everyone except Potter, who, when not busy setting up his great plan to save the whole world, still threw some insults at him.  
But there was something wrong with the Scarhead, lately. He looked so tired it could be seen a mile away. Or maybe only Draco did really see it, he who had spent five years of his life memorizing that ugly face inch by inch, those pained grimaces, that clenched jaw.  
And Draco could no longer settle for sporadic _fuck you, Ferret_ s, he could no longer stand the task he had been given.  
Later, he would have told himself a thousand times that he had done it only for self-preservation, not because he craved a reaction from Potter.  
He waited for him – no, he _leaned_ by chance – against the wall next to the door of the History of Magic classroom, when the Gryffindors were finishing their last lesson of the day.  
Then, Potter came out, followed by the Weasel and the Mudblood, and he looked so miserable, for Merlin's sake, his name at page one hundred and twelve must have been almost faded.  
Then, Draco hit him. His knuckles crashed against the other boy's nose, and a disturbing noise spread all over the corridor.  
Potter stumbled backwards – an accent a bit more titled than usual, a letter squeezed up against the white margin.

Harry clung to the wall he'd been smashed against, his eyes on fire. He punched that git in the face, right on his left cheek.  
They both ended up on the floor, in an indistinct heap of outstretched arms and twisted legs.  
It happened in a moment – the use of a verb rather than another, a full stop placed there by accident. They stopped. And stood there, two perfectly still nouns in front of a classroom, while their mates were shouting, calling for help, rooting for one of them, shrugging their shoulders in front of the umpteenth quarrel.  
They looked at each other, Harry sitting on Malfoy's stomach, who arched his back on the cold stone beneath the other's weight. And it was all so damn similar to Harry's last dream that it almost hurt – and it hurt even more knowing that this was a completely different situation.  
No one would ever find out, he promised to himself, no one, even if he sucked as an Occlumens. He would have censored himself, and hidden, and drank Polyjuice potion every day just to look like the hero everyone wanted him to be.  
But what Harry didn't know, was that Malfoy would have been on his side, with his mouth shut and his feelings set apart. The very same Slytherin who had now lost his usual grace, with blond locks all over the place, a loosened collar and a frantic chest.

Draco watched Potter's glistening eyes, his messed up hair, his lips swollen because of the punches – bright red as if they'd been given too many kisses.  
He shook him off, shocked and confused, and rushed down the corridor.  
In that moment, Draco thought he wanted to be an Animagus. He wanted to run away, to go look for that stupid bird of a Hippogriff and fly with it till the edge of the world, to disappear from the book right in the middle of a filler chapter.  
But he couldn't – so he took his Nimbus and whizzed off towards the grey sky, while the apostrophes sticked to his flesh and the narrator was too busy talking about someone else.

~

It happened eight days and twelve hours after the _Sectumsempra_ , while Harry was now becoming used to waking up from nightmares every night, his dreams of a dying Malfoy spreading on the pillow.  
It happened in the classroom that Harry hated the most, Snape's one, and in the most frequent and ironic circumstance of all time: the umpteenth detention to be served together.  
The next morning they would have said that it had just been another typo, surely, or maybe a badly copied term.  
They would have nodded and repeated it all over again, while still trying to recover from their last orgasm.  
Because there were no feelings, they would have said, as if: the only idea of walking around hand in hand was nauseating.  
And it had all been Malfoy's fault, Harry stated, because he had made one of those usual poisonous comments about Ginny, asking Potter if he'd already had the guts to get her laid.  
And it had all been Scarhead's fault, Draco replied, because he had shouted right in his face that Ginny didn't make him as crazy as a certain blond ferret did.  
It happened again, despite every effort.  
It happened when Ginny kissed Harry in front of the whole castle, and that evening the Gryffindor found himself with a bleeding lip near the Black Lake.  
It happened when Pansy insulted Hermione and Draco backed her up, and then found himself shoved against a wall at two in the morning by an invisible Potter. But, when Filch's hurried steps resounded through the corridor, Harry didn't stop to think about anything, and dragged Malfoy under his father's cloak.  
And that time it had all been Filch's fault, they agreed, 'cause he had come in the classroom looking for students, thinking he'd seen a shadow.  
It had all been his fault, only his fault, if they had been _DracoHarry_ again, hidden from the reader's attentive gaze, James's cloak covering their words.  
Then, there were the silencing charms, the threats of _Cruciatus_ , the _Imperius_  on the narrator and the unjustified absences.  
There were hearts that didn't cooperate, vocal cords saying _it's just sex_ , veins in the dark that didn't believe it.  
And then the irony of fate, its biting sarcasm: Harry and Draco making love in the Room that hosted the Vanishing Cabinet and the Halfblood Prince's book. But on the other hand, what else could be expected from a relationship between the Boy who lived and a Death Eater?  
There was the Room of Requirement, where readers can't go, where Harry and Draco wouldn't find the thing they wanted the most – they'd carry it themselves, dragging each other across the silent school.  
And in the meantime Harry knew it, he knew that the unbearable ferret was hiding something from him, he knew it every damn time he shouted at Draco in the Great Hall, every damn time they gave up at three in the morning.  
When he saw Draco on the Astronomy tower, he regretted being the protagonist of the story, he wished to be a simple minor character so he would have had some time to put his soul back in place, to try a _Reparo_ that wouldn't have worked.

~

Potter wasn't on the Hogwarts Express, that year.  
And Draco Malfoy was the same as always: white shirt, perfectly tied necktie and blond hair.  
But he had a typing error in his eyes.  
They were a thousand pages apart.

~

They saw each other again at the Malfoy Manor, Harry kneeling on the cold floor, a dark wand pointed at his neck.  
«Is that him?» Bellatrix asked, smiling.  
Draco wavered.  
It was him, of course it was, what a stupid question. No one else had irises like those.  
He denied it, said he wasn't sure and they actually believed him.

As he stood there, one step away from being discovered, Harry allowed himself to think, only for a moment, _kill me here, before his eyes_.  
  
Then, there was the war. Harsh and raw.  
There was that desperate hug when they fled away from the fire tongues in the Room of Requirement, a stolen hold, and Draco stepped back, in the end, as he didn't know how to break down the wall between them, high and massive.  
And there was Harry's corpse in Hagrid's arms, Draco's broken sob, the meaning of all the pages of his life that suddenly went up in smoke, and no translator would have ever been able to understand it, to explain it, to put it in terms that weren't a burnt heart and an infinite void in a thin body.  
Draco found himself so mad, in that moment, and he got even angrier when Harry woke up and lived again, but he didn't tell him – he just stood there, his eyes right into the other's.  
Harry froze in the middle of the battlefield. And while he was looking at Malfoy, he wondered what was the name of that feeling that had made a man change faction, the emotion that, if only a little more spread, could have stopped the war sooner.  
He wasn't brave enough to give himself an answer, not yet, and went to do what he had to, knowing that Draco was his, finally, and was fighting on his side.

~

A blank sheet later, Harry was nineteen years older.  
He reached the platform nine and three-quarters, with a wife he loved as a sister walking next to him.  
He looked around and saw Draco, far, far away, almost fading into the cloud of smoke leaving the train.  
He gritted his teeth and found himself outraged, because it wasn't fair that in their last appearance together in the book of his life, in their very last printed letters, they weren't even in the same page.  
But what Harry didn't know was that someone had left the window open.  
A gust of wind slipped into the room and hit the last two sheets of the epilogue, which rose and brushed against each other, in midair, in a kiss that tasted of ink.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hi!  
> As you've probably already understood, English isn't my mother language, so I apologise for any mistake I have surely made while translating my fic.  
> I know it's a weird and a bit over-the-top story, but I hope you liked it anyway :)  
> Kisses,
> 
> Phoenix


End file.
